A new challenge, and new challengers

If you caught up with Polygon's recent revisiting of the River City Ransom: Underground journey, you know we're all working diligently on creating the game and that the first four months have proven challenging but rewarding. We have a mountain of art assets and over 14,000 lines of original code written for the game.

We're also happy to report that after a lot of trial and error we have the English cover design that will grace posters and the reproduction game box. It was painted by none other than Gonzalo Ordóñez Arias, aka GENZOMAN, the Udon Crew talent behind the cover for Double Dragon: Neon. A fitting choice for our game, and we think it turned out great.

This means that we can roll ahead with posters, T-shirts, and the game reproductions at full steam, and hope to report on physical rewards going out the door in short order. To achieve this, we need everyone with these rewards to make their shirt and poster variant selections by the end of this month on BackerKit. That's Friday, February 28th, so we can order the materials to have them shipped to you.

A new challenge

We didn't anticipate, or weren't prepared for, a high degree of foreign exchange variability. Kickstarter Canada, as you well remember, deals in Canadian currency. While the exchange rate has maintained a fairly constant rate since the project's launch, recently the Canadian dollar has suffered compared to the United States dollar. Since a fair number of our collaborators and suppliers reside in the United States or charge in USD, this has a dramatic effect on our budget's bottom line over the long term. We're holding out for some stabilization, but wanted you to know: yes there is a vortex that eats money, and it's called foreign exchange.

Introducing the new challengers

Our team recently took on new talent to help us with some specific challenges. We're really happy to have them on board and hope you'll give them a warm welcome.

Travis "Tool" Evashkevich - The Intern

Near the beginning of the campaign, Travis continously expressed his desire to join us as part of his school's internship program. A technical artist in training, Travis has a broad range of interests and skills, and will be joining the programming team for the next several months. He is an active member of the private forums, so feel free to reach out to him and say hello.

Andrew Russell - Technical consultant

Anyone who develops XNA games and has a question has almost certainly heard of, or directly benefited from Andrew Russell's work. Not only did he single handedly write arguably the most stable open source alternative to the XNA engine, he is also a prolific accepted answer writer on GameDev Stack Exchange. Andrew is taking a short break from his own game, Stick Ninjas, to help us with network programming and making sure the game plays well in low latency conditions. He's a true expert and we're already learning a lot from him.

Comments

@Jussi
I figured that may be the case but didn't know if maybe something could work. Even putting it on an SNES flash cartridge of some sort. But, honestly, I know that would be work getting it in the correct format.
But it'll have full controller support won't it? I'll probably just do an SNES to USB adapter for a more authentic feel.

@Jared This is like in example Megaman 9 in a sense it might look like a NES game at first but in reality there's no way it runs on original hardware. So working cartridge in any case wouldn't work. But we do get physical disc with no DRM if you pledged for that so I think things are very nice for us anyway.

@Elton, I think I remember an earlier update stating that the cover only features some of the characters in the game, but there are so many characters that the cover would look ridiculous with all of them depicted. From that I am assuming that there will be more than two female characters.